Here’s Everything We Know So Far About ‘Avengers: Age Of Ultron’

With Guardians of the Galaxy having ooga-chakad its way onto our screens and into our hearts, the next Marvel Cinematic Universe movie* we’ll be shelling out too much of our hard-earned money on (thanks, movie ticket prices) is Avengers: Age of Ultron. We still have a better part of a year to wait until its May 1st, 2015 release, and Marvel’s notoriously persnickety about spoilers, but if you’re a nerd with semi-obsessive research tendencies (*eyedart*) you can cobble together a fair bit of information based on scattered quotes, rumors, and fan speculation. Sure, some of it’s of dubious accuracy. But when you have another 10 months before you get to see Cap’s glorious buns on the big screen, you have to take what you can get.

To that end, here’s everything we (think we) know about Avengers: Age of Ultron (so far).

New Characters
Let’s kick it off with the stuff everybody already knows: We’re looking at two new good guys, Quicksilver (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and Scarlet Witch (Elizabeth Olsen). They’re Avengers in the comics, and they’re also the twin children of Magneto, which is how they came to have their mut—uh, I mean superpowers. Marvel Studios can’t so much as say the “m” word without the fires of legal retribution raining down on them. So, based on the Captain America: The Winter Soldier post-credits scene, it looks like MCU Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch got their powers (super speed for him, “chaos magic” for her) after being experimented on by Baron Wolfgang von Strucker (Thomas Kretschmann) using the Infinity Stone in Loki’s scepter. As for the rest of the twins’ backstory, Marvel President Kevin Feige has said that Quicksilver’s character (and Scarlet Witch’s too, I’d assume) is greatly informed by him being “an Eastern European child of a war-torn country.”

On the other side of the morality spectrum we’re getting robot baddie the Vision (Paul Bettany), whom in the comics Scarlet Witch falls in love with and eventually marries, FYI. Thanos (Josh Brolin) is the villain being built up to for Avengers 3; he may or may not get a cameo in this film. The main villain for Ultron is, of course, Ultron (James Spader), who…

Of course, Bettany, who plays the Vision, previously voiced Tony Stark’s AI JARVIS. Given the theme of “whoops, my AI went nuts and started killing people,” it’s a reasonable assumption that JARVIS turns into the Vision at some point, likely with the help of Ultron (who created JARVIS in the comics). Tony Stark: f*cking everything up.

MARVEL

We’re Looking At Four “Prominent” Female CharactersDirector Joss Whedon hath spoken—there will be four ladies in Age of Ultron with sizable roles. Two of them are Black Widow (Scarlett Johannson) and Scarlet Witch, and the third is probably Maria Hill (Cobie Smulders), whose presence in the film has been confirmed. As for the fourth… I’unno. Possibly Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) or Agents of SHIELD‘s Skye (Chloe Bennet) or Melinda May (Ming-Na Wen). Or perhaps a brand new character, like…

Ms. Marvel, Is That You?
Or probably not Ms. Marvel, because if the rumors are to be believed (grain of salt handy, please), she will only have a cameo in Age of Ultron… possibly of the end-of-the-credits variety as a way of setting her up for a larger role in the future. The rumor comes courtesy of Badass Digest’s Devin Faraci, who says “I have information about multiple drafts of Avengers: Age of Ultron, and all feature a cameo by a character the script calls Ms. Marvel (nothing else, including a civilian name or basic look, is specified).” Feige has said in the past that they’ve “talked a lot” about doing a Captain Marvel movie (that would be the Carol Danvers version, earlier called Ms. Marvel). But they’ve also been rolling around the idea of a Black Panther movie for years now, and look how far that’s come.

He was basically sent by Ultron to kill some Avengers, failed, Wasp treated him nice, so he switched sides. Ultimately the whole thing was that Ultron built him TOO well and he possessed free will. He wasn’t really a villain exactly, he didn’t know that killing people you just met was kind of a dick move.

Theory based on only watching movies and never reading comics: Tony Stark acquires an infinity stone and uses it to power Ultron. The movie goes on. Fighting fighting, clever one-liners, more fighting. Them at the end when all hope seems lost and Ultron is about to win, Thanos swoops into action, destroys Ultron, and takes the stone for himself

it’s a nice theory, but I don’t think they’ll throw Thanos into the mix that soon. There’s still Antman, Captain America 3, Dr. Strange and probably GotG 2 before Avengers 3, so they’ll probably hold off on him for a bit.

Hey, given Scarlet Witch’s reality powers, they could actually all be hedgehogs. I don’t think I’d mind that. They’ve been apes, (alternate reality. And Cap was a VAMPIRE ape) and Thor was a frog for a while.

Because Thanos DIDN’T have the stone. It was on Earth, (first guarded by the kindly Norwegians, then taken by Red Skull, then lost in the ocean, then found by Howard Stark, then guarded by SHIELD, then it appears in the opening of The Avengers). Loki “opens the door” of the Tesseract at the beginning of the movie and invades Earth with the Chitauri at the end. The deal was, Loki gets to keep Earth, but Thanos gets the Tesseract (the Infinity Stone).

Yes that’s exactly right. But we’re talking about Loki’s sceptor, which was given to him by Thanos and The Other. Everyone, like in this article, seems to assume it’s an infinity stone (specifically the mind stone), but I haven’t heard any specific confirmation on it from Marvel.

We were just saying it’d be odd if it is, because it means Thanos had a stone and gave it away

There’s no logical reason why Thanos would hand an army AND an Infinity Stone to Loki. It doesn’t make sense to chance losing one to gain one. It is very possible he imbued the staff with power from the Mind Gem, rather than giving him the gem.

Great recap, Rebecca. I had just gotten done with the previous post by Dan. And just kind of absentmindedly moved on to this one. So I did a bit of a double take when I got to the line about Cappy’s buns. Paused, thinking “umm… Dan?” It seemed a little out of character and hilarious.

Unfortunately nowhere, because Sony owns the rights to Spidey, and Fox own the rights to the X-Men and the Fantastic Four (and hence, the Surfer) while Disney has, well, everyone else. Unless Sony stops making crappy movies that still make just enough money to justify their existence and Fozx gets tired of James McAvoy’s smarmy mug, you will never see any of them in this continuity.